Wednesday, 28 February 2007

This has a letter by Richard Murphy criticising a report in the economist. One of the statement he makes is:

More important though are the unsubstantiated claims which show this whole thing to lack objectivity. Try these:

Many successful offshore jurisdictions keep on the right side of the law, and many of the world's richest people and its biggest and most reputable companies use them quite legally to minimise their tax liability.

How does the Economist know that? The very essence of secrecy is that this is not known, and secrecy is the essence of tax havens. This claim could never be proven.

This does cut both ways. The logic of this position is that statements by Mr Murphy on places like Jersey being full of money laundering and tax evasion monies cannot be proven either, and yet he continually makes that kind of assertion, with just as much - or rather as little - evidence as the economist. One could well say that the essence of secrecy, or rather what is not known, is that it encourages make believe, and that depends upon who is doing the believing. It is the rorschach ink blot test; it reveals more about the viewer than anything else. A fallibilist (Popperan) approach would be to say what might be possible, give it a note that it is only one speculative outcome, and where there is insufficient evidence, make it clear. That is done by most modern historians (e.g. Hutton, Sanders etc), but the lesson has yet to be learnt elsewhere.

"And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? "

Tuesday, 20 February 2007

This is the Declaration of War Against Exploiters of Lakota Spirituality. I think the statement "for too long we have suffered the unspeakable indignity of having our most precious Lakota ceremonies and spiritual practices desecrated, mocked and abused by non-Indian "wannabes," hucksters, cultists, commercial profiteers and self-styled "New Age shamans" and their followers" sums up why this matters very much, and why I think it is important. It is basically a kind of identity theft, in which counterfeits destroy the value of the genuine article. I can see why they are so angry (it is a very angry document - from the use of the word "war" in the title), and I think they have a good case, especially as they have already suffered from physical oppression already.

Declaration of WarAgainst Exploiters of Lakota Spirituality

First of all; We (meaning A.I.C.S.) did not write this declaration.It was written by Lakota/Dakota/Nakota Spiritual people.We do however support, and we encourage others to support, each and every word written here.Elders don't get around the internet like we do, so they are only partly aware of all the exploitation going on. Support those who wrote these words making it known to the exploiters - we know who and what they are, we do not approve, we are watching, and we are notifying others. Above all else, BOYCOTT the fakes and make sure your friends do not fall victim to them! At the Lakota Summit V, an international gathering of US and Canadian Lakota, Dakota and Nakota Nations, about 500 representatives from 40 different tribes and bands of the Lakota unanimously passed a "Declaration of War Against Exploiters of Lakota Spirituality." The following declaration was unanimously passed on June 10, 1993

Declaration of War

WHEREAS we are the conveners of an ongoing series of comprehensive forums on the abuse and exploitation of Lakota spirituality; and

WHEREAS we represent the recognized traditional spiritual leaders, traditional elders, and grassroots advocates of the Lakota people; and

WHEREAS for too long we have suffered the unspeakable indignity of having our most precious Lakota ceremonies and spiritual practices desecrated, mocked and abused by non-Indian "wannabes," hucksters, cultists, commercial profiteers and self-styled "New Age shamans" and their followers; and

WHEREAS with horror and outrage we see this disgraceful expropriation of our sacred Lakota traditions has reached epidemic proportions in urban areas throughout the country; and

WHEREAS our precious Sacred Pipe is being desecrated through the sale of pipestone pipes at flea markets, powwows, and "New Age" retail stores; and

WHEREAS pseudo-religious corporations have been formed to charge people money for admission into phony "sweatlodges" and "vision quest" programs; and

WHEREAS sacrilegious "sundances" for non-Indians are being conducted by charlatans and cult leaders who promote abominable and obscene imitations of our sacred Lakota sundance rites; and

WHEREAS academic disciplines have sprung up at colleges and universities institutionalizing the sacrilegious imitation of our spiritual practices by students and instructors under the guise of educational programs in "shaminism;" and

WHEREAS non-Indian charlatans and "wannabes" are selling books that promote the systematic colonization of our Lakota spirituality; and

WHEREAS the television and film industry continues to saturate the entertainment media with vulgar, sensationalist and grossly distorted representations of Lakota spirituality and culture which reinforce the public's negative stereotyping of Indian people and which gravely impair the self-esteem of our children; and

WHEREAS individuals and groups involved in "the New Age Movement," in "the men's movement," in "neo-paganism" cults and in "shamanism" workshops all have exploited the spiritual traditions of our Lakota people by imitating our ceremonial ways and by mixing such imitation rituals with non-Indian occult practices in an offensive and harmful pseudo-religious hodgepodge; and

WHEREAS the absurd public posturing of this scandalous assortment of psuedo-Indian charlatans, "wannabes," commercial profiteers, cultists and "New Age shamans" comprises a momentous obstacle in the struggle of traditional Lakota people for an adequate public appraisal of the legitimate political, legal and spiritual needs of real Lakota people; and

WHEREAS this exponential exploitation of our Lakota spiritual traditions requires that we take immediate action to defend our most precious Lakota spirituality from further contamination, desecration and abuse;

THEREFORE WE RESOLVE AS FOLLOWS:

1. We hereby and henceforth declare war against all persons who persist in exploiting, abusing and misrepresenting the sacred traditions and spiritual practices of our Lakota, Dakota and Nakota people.

2. We call upon all our Lakota, Dakota and Nakota brothers and sisters from reservations, reserves, and traditional communities in the United States and Canada to actively and vocally oppose this alarming take-over and systematic destruction of our sacred traditions.

3. We urge our people to coordinate with their tribal members living in urban areas to identify instances in which our sacred traditions are being abused, and then to resist this abuse, utilizing whatever specific tactics are necessary and sufficient --for example demonstrations, boycotts, press conferences, and acts of direct intervention.

4. We especially urge all our Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota people to take action to prevent our own people from contributing to and enabling the abuse of our sacred ceremonies and spiritual practices by outsiders; for, as we all know, there are certain ones among our own people who are prostituting our spiritual ways for their own selfish gain, with no regard for the spiritual well-being of the people as a whole.

5. We assert a posture of zero-tolerance for any "white man's shaman" who rises from within our own communities to "authorize" the expropriation of our ceremonial ways by non-Indians; all such "plastic medicine men" are enemies of the Lakota, Dakota and Nakota people.

6. We urge traditional people, tribal leaders, and governing councils of all other Indian nations, to join us in calling for an immediate end to this rampant exploitation of our respective American Indian sacred traditions by issuing statements denouncing such abuse; for it is not the Lakota, Dakota and Nakota people alone whose spiritual practices are being systematically violated by non-Indians.

7. We urge all our Indian brothers and sisters to act decisively and boldly in our present campaign to end the destruction of our sacred traditions, keeping in mind our highest duty as Indian people: to preserve the purity of our precious traditions for our future generations, so that our children and our children's children will survive and prosper in the sacred manner intended for each of our respective peoples by our Creator.

I've come across one of Patrick Jasper Lee's books at the library: "We Borrow the Earth: An Intimate Portrait of the Gypsy Shamanic Tradition and Culture"; it smacks of electicism and fakery. Buckland has also contributed to false stories with his Roman Tarot etc.

I think this paragraph somes up the worst of the fakery to be found:

The pervasiveness of this new-age crystals-and-candles image is nowhere more in evidence than on the E-bay Internet auction site, where "sexy gypsy-wicca blouses" and the like account for almost all of the over two thousand "gypsy" offerings posted there daily (several further examples of this mystical image may be found at http://www.cox-internet.com/gypsie.htm).Another site, "The Gypsy" (at http://larp.com/jahavra/gypsy1.html) informs the visitor that "Gypsies are normally dark skinned with bold flashing eyes; however it is not unusual to find golden or crimson haired Gypsies . . most Gypsies live in traveling wagons called vardos . . . the campfire is the center of Gypsy family life; the three distinct nations of the Gypsy are the Lowara, the Ursari and the Kalderasha."

Does it matter? By this nonsense, true Romany culture is denigrated, and its identity stolen. I'll send you the email about the American Indians on this.

To be fair, not all fake Romani culture has been faked deliberately.More often it is simply the result of misguided or misinformed hypotheses finding their way into the conventional account, and being repeated by subsequent writers unchecked. A prime example of deliberately faked tradition, however, is found in Manfri Fred Woods' much‑publicized In The Life of a Romany Gypsy which appeared in 1973.Here, he summarized on pages 65‑69 what was allegedly remembered of the original Romani religion. He begins "[n]ow, as to Romany religion, there is not much anybody remembers of it today. There was a prophet called Soster, and a lot of the stories had to do with him". Wood then goes on to relate the story of the creation of the universe and the world out of a burst of fire, and of the two gods Moshto and Arivell, and Moshto's three sons, and the ginkgo or maidenhair tree, and of the two clay figures into whose mouths Moshto blew its seeds to give them life.

What is curious is that six years later, Leon Petulengro (Leon Lloyd) repeated the story in his own book Romany Boy, where on pages 136‑137 the same accountof a void within a void, and the explosion of a ball of fire, and of the two gods, Moshto and Arivell, and Moshto's three sons, and the two clay figures, and the ginkgo tree, is told. But this time the story is attributed to his paternal grandmother Anyeta who, he says on page 12, came from Romania.He had already introduced her a decade earlier as "Anyeta, a Romanian Zingari, and a true Romany herbalist" in his The Roots of Health (1968:15), though that book makes no mention of Moshto or the old religion.In Romany Boy (1979:24) her membership in a "tribe" in Romania is referred to, as well as her being the head of her tribe, presumably also in Romania since he states that after coming to England, she "did not live with us but with my father's cousin and his tribe, the Lovells".Oddly, he has her speaking British Romani with native fluency on the same page. In 1936 his father, Gipsy (elsewhere Gypsy) Petulengro, "King of the Romanies" (1968:15) wrote a book of his own entitled A Romany Life, but his mother Anyeta does not appear in it by name even though she is featured throughout quite prominently. He seems to have first introduced the actual name Anyeta in a chain‑letter he circulated in 1940.On pages 2, 25 and 162 of A Romany Life she is referred to as a "Berber", Petulengro Senior's own peculiar notion of Romani origins which he'd already spelt out in The Listener (1935: 649) a year earlier. In an essay there, he wrote that

The Romanies are not Egyptians, nor descendants of Egyptians, as many people seem to think.The Romanies are descendants of the Berbers, who trekked to practically every country in the world.

There is much else to question in A Romany Lifethus the spurious jargon presented as Romani (pages 33, 49 and passim), and the use of uniquely British forms presented as Romanian Vlax (boro‑roy, tarno, rokkered), contrasting with Continental Romani pronunciations presented as the dialect spoken in England (e.g. yag-kash for yog-koshter, 'firewood') in his Listener essays on British Romani life.In The Roots of Health the slogan kooshti sante! appears more than once as Romani for "good health", though sante (santé) is a French word.

The question arises: who was the original owner of the Moshto story? Evidently Wood, since his version predates Petulengro's by six years. He linked it to general but fading community memory, while Petulengro on the other hand attributed it specifically to his grandmother from Romania, though in an account so similar to Woods' as scarcely to be coincidence.

The most detailed study of Romani spiritual belief among Romanian (Vlax) Romanies is Chatard & Bernard (1959).Here (pages 22‑26) some of this story appears, although there is no reference to Moshto or Arivell by name. Instead, there are O PouroDel and O Bheng, which is to say "the old god" and "the devil" in Vlax Romani. The two clay figures are mentioned, and called Damo and Yehwah, clearly Adam and Eve. They are brought to life not by the seeds of the maidenhair tree, but by O Pouro Del's touching each of them with his wand.Wlislocki (1890) doesn't include the story, nor is it found in the imaginative works of Jean‑Claude Frère (1973) or Françoise Cozannet (1973). The equally suspect Clébert (1961) relies on Chatard & Bernard, but does refer to a similarity with Zoroastrianism and Manichæanism, while Elysseeff (1890:169), summarizing Kounavine's concocted work, wrote that

The essence of the primitive beliefs of the Gypsies [is] borrowed from the different religions encountered by the Gypsies on their journey, and particularly those borrowed from the religion of Zoroaster.

Kounavine was one of the boldest concocters of fake Romani culture, claiming that he found Brahma, Indra, Lakshmi, Ahriman and other deities being worshipped by name among Romanies in Russia, who (he said) had also retained a number of elaborate Hindu prayers. But we learn about his "immense store of [Romani] materials" only at second hand in the same article by Elysseeff, none of which can be examined at first hand since Kounavine says he lost it all in the snows of Siberia.Sampson has already commented on Kounavine as "not to be taken too seriously" (1907:7), pointing out that one of the alternative names he gives for Brahma is Khakhava (XAXABA in the original, i.e. xoxavav) which in Romani means "I deceive"the word itself has passed into Russian slang with a similar meaning.Was this given him by a Romani interviewee who was having fun with the inquisitive gadjo, or was Kounavine himself having a private joke at the expense of his readers?

Correspondence within its inner circle during the early years of the Gypsy Lore Society contained a number of risqué exchanges, with "Romani words providing a coded language" (Sampson, 1997:111, where John Sampson's verses composed for Dora Yates provide just one example).These were not usually meant for its general membership but rather as in-group humour to be understood and appreciated only by the initiates.Did this sometimes deliberately find its way into material for a wider, though unsuspecting, audience, perhaps like Kounavine's Khakhava or Frank Elmény's heroine Gali Minsh (i.e. kali mind) in his novel Poor Janos, thereby compounding the fun?

Some wordlists reflect legitimate misunderstandings recorded in earnest, such as Sinclair's (1915) brokla for "cabbage" (actually the English word "broccoli") or karri, korri listed to mean "cock, domestic fowl" (the actual meaning is "penis"); Prince (1907), probably lifting from Smart (1863:7) where the same mistake occurs, has kovaskaruk "willow, laurel" when this is simply kova's a ruk, i.e. "that's a tree".Even Manfri Fred Wood, in the wordlist at the end of his book (op. cit., 122), lists becker as "fruit", evidently a misreading of the entry in a lexicon he had of English Romani collected by a site worker called Alice Bartlett, where she had it correctly glossed, though poorly handwritten, as "frog".Wood's mistake is now listed in Hayward's Romany Dictionary (2003:38,108).One may imagine Vasily Zuev pointing to a window in an attempt to collect the Romani word for 'glass,' for which word he entered xiv, 'hole' instead in his word-list (1789:124). This latter is also used for 'window' (cf. Angloromani dikin-hev).Bryant (1785) lists bauro beval acochenos for "storm" ("big wind a-catchin' us") and porcherie for "brass" (actually posh hori, "halfpenny"); Harriot (1830) has charicklo "cage" when the word means "bird," and vailgoro "fair (skinned)" when it means "fair, carnival."Roberts (1836) has chivya "tongs" when it means "tongues;" Smart (1863) has sorto-poov for "garden" when what he heard was "sort o' phuv," i.e. "sort of ground."Leland (1882) has gogemars for "swamps" (he heard the English word "quagmires") and kris for "mustard" (deduced from "mustard and creese," i.e. "cress" in the London dialect).

But sometimes these collectors were the innocent dupes of their informants and such errors were deliberately provided; Otto Duhmberg's 1870 wordlist of Siberian Romani for example has the entry kari glossed as "grandson", chamrimintsch (i.e. xa miri mind) as "granddaughter" and bremintsch (i.e. barimind) for "donkey".Bryant (op. cit., 390) records ming for "father;" Sampson (1891: 59) has written about the frequent offering of this particular word to lexicographers.

But to return to Moshto.Given that Clébert's very popular book became widely available in English in a Penguin paperback edition in 1967, the possibility must be considered that Manfri Wood, or else his ghost‑writer John Brune used this as a general source and subsequently sought out some literature on the Zoroastrian religionand as a result, on the basis of the original Zoroaster, Ahriman and Mazda created the names Soster, Arivell and Moshto (this last perhaps also influenced by the Romani word mishto "well, good").Six years later, Leon Petulengro (or perhaps his ghost‑writer Betty Messenger) plagiarized it practically word for word.

Leon Petulengro's father was Walter Lloyd, a herbalist from Rochdale, who wrote under the name Gipsy (or Gypsy, and also sometimes Xavier) Petulengro. By his own account (1935:80) his family name "Lloyd" was a re‑spelling of the Welsh word llwyd meaning "grey" but which, he maintained, was in their case really an anglicization of the Romani word for horse, grai.

For a while he also called himself Walter Smith. A smith is a petulengro in Borrovian Romani, more accurately petalengro (from petalo, "horseshoe"his own 'spelling pronunciation' of the word as pet-yew-lengro is evidence enough that he was not familiar with it as actually spoken), and he claimed to be a direct descendant of Borrow's Jasper Petulengro; the information that "Gypsy Petulengro is the grandson of Tinker Petulengro immortalised by George Borrow" appears under his name in the Listener series, and in his book (on the second page) he recounts that

[as a child in Romania] I could not speak English, although my father spoke English and Welsh being the son of Tinker Jasper Petulengro immortalized by George Borrow in his books.

One wonders how he ever communicated with his father if he didn't speak English himself; his father, after all, revealed all of Anyeta's herbal mysteries to him "when [he] was a boy" (1968:15).Yet it could not have been in Angloromani, itself a register of English, and spoken very far away indeed from Romania.Furthermore, since Jasper Petulengro (George Smith in real life) was in fact from East Anglia, why would his son, Leon's father, necessarily have spoken Welsh?

Fred Wood's story has been picked up and woven into at least one published work of fiction, Charles De Lint's Mulengro: A Romany Tale (1985), where Moshto is mentioned on pages 87 and 277, as well as into several websites (Gypsy Phoenix Rising's"Gypsy" site at http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Sparta/ 7313/gyps.html and another at http:// riverendell. fortunecity.com/ legions/379/fullstory4.html are just two examples); it has also found its way into academic treatises and been retold as though it were fact.Thus W.R. Rishi, in his book Roma writes (1976:79), with his own additions, that

the supreme god is Moshto (from the Romani word mishto meaning good) symbol of goodness, and Arivell (from Sanskrit ari 'enemy'), the symbol of evil.Moshto's three sons are the trinity of Hindu gods, Brahma (the creator), Vishnu (the sustainer) and Shiva (the killer of all that is evil).

At the same section in his book, Rishi also paraphrases and quotes Kounavine extensively as fact.Dennis Liggio dealt with it as real in an unpublished essay entitled The Influences of Zoroastrianism and Manichæanism on the Romani Creation Myth (1996), while John McLaughlin, a professor at The University of Illinois, recounts it in detail in his book Gypsy Lifestyles (1980:4‑7). Taking his cue, though maybe unwittingly, from Leon Petulengro, McLaughlin elaborated the story with embellishments of his own, stating (on pages 6-7) that

Moshto laid down strict rules of cleanliness to ward off disease, and many of these practices are still followed today by the gypsies . . . As will become clear later, the gypsies believe these stories, and they have a serious impact on gypsy life.

At any rate Professor McLaughlin evidently believes that Romanies believe them, and his widely‑consulted book has certainly helped to entrench this concocted folklore yet more firmly in the ubiquitous and alternative Romani historical identity that continues to misdirect and misinform the interested scholar.I personally have not met nor heard of anyone, whether Romanichal or Vlax, who was acquainted with the Moshto story, and there is every indication that it originated with Wood, though likelier with John Brune.

This is not the only spurious account of the original Romani religion.More recently, Patrick Jasper Lee has begun offering courses on "Romany Gypsy Jal" through his Romani Life Foundation website (http://www. romanilife.com), though curiously there is no mention of it in his earlier book (Lee, 2000).This is a philosophy which, he says "originated in India and was carried into Europe by the Romany Gypsies 500 years ago," and which he describes as "the religion that became lost . . the indigenous culture" of the Romani people.Jal is said to be cognate with the English word "year" and the German "Jahr," and to mean "to journey" or "to go;" one meditational practice intended for self-empowerment is the Nogo Jal Drom or "personal Jal road."Jal, however, is a word specific to the Romanichal dialect, and while it does mean "go," it originates in the Common Romani inflected form that means "he goes"Romani doesn't have infinitive verbsand so this can hardly be an ancient term in the language.Still more specifically English Romani is the word nogo; it means "own" in that dialect, but it isn't originally Romani at all, instead being a word adopted from German "(mei)n eige(n)" during the migration through northern Europe into the British Isles; several other German words have found their way into the Romanichal dialect as well, such as waffodi ("bad"), foshena ("fake") and swegla ("tobacco pipe"). The late Henry Sherriff claimed to "still speak the inflected puri chib, and thereby to be the last speaker in the country" and wrote extensive letters from prison in it to his lawyer friend Richard Wade, but upon investigation "it quickly became apparent that huge chunks of [his] puri chib Anglo Romani were actually lifted, often verbatim, from other books, especially Smart and Crofton" (Dawson, 1988:ix-x).

The fact that some of these invented "facts" originate with Romanies themselvesand we may add Ray Buckland, Lee Fuhler and Patronella Cooper to the list (see bibliography) is distressing, since it gives the stamp of legitimacy to such misinformation and, when exposed, only reinforces the image of untrustworthiness we must live with.It also suggests that while these authors may indeed have one or more Romani forebears, that fact is only incidental to their real life, which clearly lacks any first-hand involvement with the day-to-day Romani world; they have accepted instead the 'magical' pop-culture stereotype created by non-Romanies.If they are fully aware of what they are doing and are exploiting such misinformation solely for profit, then they do no credit to the people they claim to represent, and seriously hold back the Romani human rights effort.

The pervasiveness of this new-age crystals-and-candles image is nowhere more in evidence than on the E-bay Internet auction site, where "sexy gypsy-wicca blouses" and the like account for almost all of the over two thousand "gypsy" offerings posted there daily (several further examples of this mystical image may be found at http://www.cox-internet.com/gypsie.htm).Another site, "The Gypsy" (at http://larp.com/jahavra/gypsy1.html) informs the visitor that "Gypsies are normally dark skinned with bold flashing eyes; however it is not unusual to find golden or crimson haired Gypsies . . most Gypsies live in traveling wagons called vardos . . . the campfire is the center of Gypsy family life; the three distinct nations of the Gypsy are the Lowara, the Ursari and the Kalderasha."

Romani Studies has lent itself easily to scholarly fabrication, and the literature is replete with it; Decourdemanche's "Romani script" reproduced uncritically by Clébert is one well‑known example, as are the off-colour sentences that appear inserted into one version of Andrew Boorde's 1542 text of early British Romani ("Mayde shew us yr tyttes"  Achae te sycke vesse meng itirrae berkes, "Mayde prythee doff thyn knyckeres"  Achae te lelle patouty tirrae drawers, "Allo darling give us one off ye wrysste then"  A pirani te des mai cabbe rancke), as sexist as they are mocking of Romani historiography.

Other Romani "facts" which, once claimed, may get repeated ad infinitum have to do with the vocabulary of the language.These have without exception been made by people who don't speak Romani, but whose authority shows itself in their perceptions of what Romani should or should not be like.Elsewhere I documented the repetition of the idea that Romani lacks words for "possession" and "duty" from ten different sources (Hancock, 1998), each copying from its predecessor over a period of more than a century, and seemingly having originated with statements first found in Grellmann (1807).Eleanor Smith writes that "in the gypsy language the words 'divine' and 'devilish' are the same" (1943:59)  a novelist, incidentally, whom Angus Fraser called "desperately fond of inventing fantasies about herself, [and who] liked to claim Gypsy blood" (1994:29). These two words, both native to the language, could not be more different, viz. devlikano and bengesko.Similar statements from other writers maintain that Romani does not have words for "truth", "beautiful", "read", "write", "time", "danger", "warmth" and "quiet".

An example of the inaccurate, though probably not deliberate, presentation of Romani custom and belief is in Barbara Walker's Women's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets which appeared in 1983, and which contains many Roma-related references throughout, all written in the past tense and all with a feminist (and often anti-male) bias.One example of this reads "[t]he matriarch was the center of Gypsy tribal life; everything that went on around a tribal mother resembled the old pagan sex rites.Her husband was a drone, whose function was to impregnate her . . . if he failed to beget perfect children, the tribe 'accidentally' killed him" (p. 361).Like other concocters, Walker based her statements not on first-hand acquaintance with Romanies, but on the writings of others, in this case Derlon (1977). An examination of that book reveals that Derlon's already lurid descriptions had been very freely elaborated upon further by Walker who, like Rishi and McLaughlin, could not resist the urge to editorialize, pad and reinterpret.

Elsewhere she states that "together with 'Smith', 'Faa' is the most common gypsy surname', and means 'fay' or 'fairy'" (p. 361).But this is in fact an old lowland Scottish surname and not Romani in origin at all, and was adopted only after Romanies arrived in Scotland in the late 1400s.Again, "the popular gypsy surname Kaldera or Kalderas may have been derived from [the name of the Hindu goddess] Kali‑Devi" (p. 363). The reference given for this is Esty (1969:67) which, on being consulted, actually says that " . . . the Kaldera tribe, that huge group of Gypsies spread halfway around the world . . . governed in patriarchal fashion. There is no king or chief: all the men in the vitsa make all the decisions".No mention of Barbara Walker's Kaldera, or of popularity, or of surnames, although Esty does state incorrectly that Kaldera Romanies have no leaders. The word itself is Romanian for "coppersmith," and cognate with the English word "cauldron."

Another example of what is probably a deliberate concoction is found in John Geipel's book The Europeans (1969).A serious historical and linguistic study it includes Romani, stating in a footnote

A gipsy street seller of lucky charms recently told the author in the Portobello Road, 'Well, if you putches me, baw, cheeros is vassavo just now.We on'y bickins about desh cawlie matchkers in a sawler.Gi's a coupla tringerooshies for a cuppa mooter an' a packet o' tooves, wontcher?' ("Well, if you asks me, mate, times is hard just now.We only sells about ten black cats in a morning.Give us a couple of bob for a cup of tea and some cigarettes, won't you?"  a fantastic mixture of English, cant, Sanskrit, Turkish, Slavic and possibly German)! (op. cit., p. 90).

While it's conceivable that this could have happened, it is most unlikely that it in fact did.Why would a Romanichal use his ethnolect with a total stranger, expecting him to understand it? The sentence would appear to be a Borromani concoction, but it misinterprets cheeros as a plural noun, and he has the man asking for a cup of urine.Like Winifred Lehmann, whose Romani sample in his linguistics textbook contains not a word of Romani (1983: 214), academic rigour can get less attention when it comes to Romanies and the Romani language.

In 1973, Dodgson drew attention to what he hoped might have been the very first documented sample of written Romani: a rhyme apparently published in 1517, a full quarter-century earlier than Boorde's sentences referred to above.He had come across the following bawdy incantation while thumbing through a (then) recently-published book on witchcraft by Peter Haining (1972):

Dui rika hin mire mine

Dui yara hin leskro kor

Avnas dui yek jelo

Keren akana yek jeles

As his source for this, Haining listed a work of esoterica entitled the Grimorium Verum, for which he gave a publication date of 1517.Hodgson was unable to locate the Grimorium and so wrote to Peter Haining in care of his publisher.Haining replied that he had also been unable to find the book, but had been given the verses and that reference by an (unidentified) colleague.He also failed to provide a return address. Hodgson then passed the task along to the late Angus Fraser, who ascertained that the book is generally believed by scholars to be an eighteenth, rather than a sixteenth, century work, but who was himself also unable to locate a copy.

The rhyme is in a remarkably standardized spelling for a 16th (or even an 18th) century Romani text, although it contains the misreading mine for minč in its first line. The dialect is a Central one, probably from the Hungarian-Slovak or the Transylvanian lands, and the orthographic conventions are English, not Continental, to judge from the evident values of the 'j' and the 'y'.Given its form, and that it is an incantation to ensure fertility in women, a few readily available sources from which it might have been lifted come at once to mind.The only one aimed at a popular market, however, is Leland (1891), and sure enough, the verse is to be found on page 100 of that book, with the following form:

Dui riká hin mire min

Dui yārá hin leskro kor

Avnás dūi yek jelo

Keren akána yek jeles

Leland made no secret of the fact that many of the rhymes and incantations throughout his book, as well as their orthography, were taken from Wlislocki's various works.Consulting these, the original source for the rhyme in question is revealed in an article by him written in 1887 concerning birth, life and death beliefs among tent-dwelling Romanies in Transylvania.

While Leland is known for his creativity where Romani language and culture are concerned, the culprit this time would appear to be Peter Haining, whose lack of familiarity with Romani orthography, and whose failure to identify his source or to provide his own return address, make him another prime candidate for Concocter of Fake Gypsy History.

Leland himself was probably guiltier of sloppy investigative techniques and an active imagination than of intentionally creating academic hoaxes.He elicited some of his 'Romani' vocabulary from his informants by reading words from a Hindi dictionary to them and asking whether they sounded familiar.Being paid or treated to food and drink for their time, they clearly didn't want to disappoint their interrogator.

His contemporary George Borrow is also responsible for creating non-existent Romani words, which have been picked up from his books and reproduced elsewhere (for example by Pott, 1844, and by Miklosich, 1872) and he may well qualify for the category of deliberate concocter (Hancock, 1997); well over half of the unsubstantiated words in Smart & Crofton's dictionary of English Romani (1875:157-163) originate with Borrow, which they diplomatically say he "procured from various and widespread sources" (op. cit., p. xij).These include words from other Romani dialects which he inserted into English Romani, such as covantza 'anvil' or pishota 'bellows', as well as words with Continental Romani forms distinct from their English Romani equivalents such as pindro 'hoof' and gulo 'sweet' (Angloromani piro, gudlo), and even words from Spanish such as mosco 'a fly' and vol 'to fly'.In addition he created words of his own, such as bolli-mengreskonæs 'after the manner of a Christian' and yeckly 'only' while at the same time calling such fabrications "genuine Gypsy . . . clear-sounding and melodious" (1874:11).An excellent extended discussion of manipulating Romani lexicon is found in Grant (1994).

Borrow's inventiveness is betrayed by his poor knowledge of Romani grammar in his discussion of a verse he calls "the oldest specimen of English Gypsy at present extant, and perhaps the purest . . . at least as old as the time of Elizabeth" (1923:11). The lines in question, with his own translation, are

Coin si deya, coin si dado? ("who's your mother, who's yourfather")

Pukker mande drey Romanes,("do thou answer me in Romany")

Ta mande pukkeravava tute("and I will answer thee.")

Coin is the form of Common Romani kon ("who")which he imported into the Romanichal dialect from his vocabulary of Spanish Romani, though it is not attested in any other dialect; deya and dado are both vocatives and cannot follow the verb si, the former taken from his Lovari wordlist, and not found in Britain (though he does have the British form daiya elsewhere in his book). In the second line, Romanes is an adverb, though he doesn't seem to have realized this; he has it glossed as a noun in his dictionary, and believing it to be a noun has it following the preposition drey.In the form Rumnis it is a noun today, but it would not have been in the sixteenth century. In the third line, he has the inflected locative forms mande and tute ("at me", "at you") functioning as personal pronouns as they do only in Angloromani, while pukkeravava is a causative verb form, meaning "I'm being made to tell".The verses, in British Romani, ought to have read kon si tiri daj, kon si tiro dad, phuker mange romanes tha (me) phukerava tuke.

An amusing though unintentional reinterpretation of a word is found in Sutton's 1982 reprint of Borrow's Lavo-Lil, where the original hin "to void ordure" is glossed as "to avoid ordure".This is modern Angloromani hingger or hinder "defecate".

Two writers who have shamelessly appropriated from each other's work, even to the extent of copying each other's mistakes, are represented in Romani lexicography; we find for example the English Romani word for "hedgehog," hochiwichi, turning up in Romanian Romani wordlists such as that by Kogalnitchan who lists hotschauitscha (1837:60), or Vaillant, who has hoc'awiça (1861:108)though the source of the word is in the regional English dialect urchin (cf. the prickly "sea urchin"), and it exists only in Britain, having first been recorded by Roberts in 1836, Vaillant's and Kogalnicean's unacknowledged source.There is likewise scarcely a dictionary of Caló (Spanish Romani) that is original, each one copying freely from the one preceding it, mistakes and all, usually without a word of acknowledgment.

Roger Moreau has built an entire thesis around a misinterpretation.On the basis of the word "Nawar", the place-name Dasht i Nawar is believed by him to mean "Desert of the Nawar".According to the standard Nelles 1:1,500,000 map of Afghanistan there is a Lake Navar about 90 miles west of Ghazni, and Moreau places his desert next to this. It is posited by him in his book to be the location to which three Indian peoples were taken from India as captives by Mohammed of Ghazni, three distinct ethnic groups who grew together over time to become the ancestors of the Romanies. "Nawar" is an Arabic name for the Domari-speaking Gypsies in the Middle East.Their eventual date of departure for the West, he maintains, was at the end of the 12th century:

"When do you think they left that terrible place on their journey West, Uncle?"

"The year following the Battle of Taraintwenty-five miles north of DelhiAD 1193 would be my guess.In fact I'd put Patsi's shirt on it" (p. 111).

He continues (p. 116) "[t]hey had entered Dasht i Nawar as three separate peoples.Three and a half centuries later they were leaving as a race, the appellations Lohar, Banjara and Kanjar forgotten.Their 'Romany roots' had taken hold".But that would have been in AD 843, over a century before Mohammed of Ghazni was born.

Nawar is the plural of Nuri, elsewhere known as Luri and Luli, and probably adopted by Arabic from the Indian luth, meaning "plunderer" (cf. lur "robber" in Romani).One would assume, then, that the entire toponym were Arabic.However, "Desert of the Nawar" would be sahra' i nawar in that language. The word dat means "rubbish" in Arabic.In Persian, long the lingua franca of Afghanistan, the word for "desert" is either the adopted Arabic sāhra or the native biaban, while Nawar is an Iranian family name entirely unconnected with the Dom.The indigenous language of the area, however, is Pashto, and here, the word for "desert" is dat, and nawār in Pashto means "a cultivated place, a habitation"Dat-i-Nawar, therefore, in the native language of the area, means something like "inhabited desert" rather than "desert of the Nawar".Alternatively, if the lake's name Navar is the source of the toponym, it is hardly likely that a lake in a non-Arabic-speaking country would be named with the Arabic word for "Gypsies".If the area is called dat today (though Dasht i Nawar doesn't appear on the Nelles map) this is surely more recent, and refers to the fact that the lakebed is now dry.The very name Lake Navar indicates that it held water in the past, and it is hard to imagine that 1200 years ago the area adjacent to it would have been a desert and named as such for the Lohar, Banjara and Kanjar that Moreau believes to have occupied it.

Like the Moshto story which has been picked up and repeated as fact in works published subsequently, Moreau's account of Romani origins is likewise already finding adherents.Patrick Lee (op. cit.: 27) says it provides

. . . a more feasible solution to the puzzle of the Gypsies' early days.Roger Moreau . . . suggests that the Gypsies were taken from their homeland in vast numbers as slaves in the ninth century AD by the Afghan-Turks who used them to ferry booty out of India into Afghanistan.Three tribes, the Lohar, the Banjara and the Kanjar, who bore a great resemblance to the Gypsies in Europe and who were also at the lower end of the caste system in India, provided easy pickings for these ruthless marauders in their greed for India's vast wealth.

Besides questioning the actual meaning of Dat-i-Nawar, and therefore the entire hypothesis that rests upon it, the date of the exodus proposed by Moreau (the ninth century) and the identity of the ancestors of the Romanies (from "the lower end of the caste system in India") also bear scrutiny.

Regarding the date, the relocation of the Lohar, Banjara and the Kanjar into non-Indian-speaking territory in the first half of the 9th century does not coincide with the fact that the language or languages which subsequently developed into Romani were still a part of Middle Indo-Aryan at the time of its development into New Indo-Aryan at the beginning of the eleventh century.We know this because of the redistribution of the original Middle Indo-Aryan neuter gender, which became reassigned to either masculine or feminine when it began to be lost.The redistribution of the nouns in Romani which derive from original Middle Indo-Aryan neuters match those in e.g. Hindi and Panjabi at a rate approaching 100%; if pre-Romani had left India in the 800s it would have done so with three grammatical genders, and the subsequent loss of the neuter would have occurred randomly, outside of India.Furthermore, every one of the Persian words in the language is traceable to New Persian only.

Regarding the caste identity of the pre-Roma, Bhalla (1992:331-332), on the basis of bio-anthropological data comparing Romani and Indian blood groups, concludes that

the results of the distance analysis clearly refute the Dom theory.The gene pool of East European Gypsies is more in line with the stock of Indian people represented by Jat Sikhs, Panjabi Hindus and Rajputs, who share a common ethnic substratum.The dominant ethnic element in the Doms and Kolis, the two representatives of the low caste population, is Proto-Australoid, which is not reflected in any sizeable proportion in the genetic makeup of East European Gypsies.

This "common ethnic substratum" is supported by recent and more rigorous serological investigation.A team of researchers at Cowan University's Centre for Human Genetics in Perth, after exhaustive blood samplings from 14 Romani communities throughout Europe, concluded in a report dated June, 2001, that

Analysis of slow-evolving polymorphisms has identified a single paternal and a single maternal lineage of Indian shared by all [Romani] groups . . . these lineages belong to a small subset of the known genetic diversity of the Indian subcontinent.Thus, Roma descend from a small ancestral ethnic minority in the Indian subcontinent that has subsequently fractured into multiple population isolates within Europe.

Elsewhere (Hancock, 2002), I discuss the need for higher academic standards in treatments of Romanies. The very latest authoritative volume, part of Gale Research'sIndigenous Peoples of the World Series (Sharp, 2003) still begins "The Gypsies are a nomadic people . . . living and traveling in caravans of colorfully painted wagons," and has all groups belonging to vitsas, a category and a word exclusive to the Vlax Romanies alone.The author also maintains that Romani is not a written language(p. 49), despite abundant evidence to the contrary on the many websites she consulted in preparing the book.That certain authors demonstrate less attention to accuracy may well be a reflection, conscious or not, of the low regard in which they hold Romanies as a people.As controversial as such findings as those of Bhalla and others may be, like the contemporary linguistic research being undertaken by Boretzky, Bakker, Matras, Friedman, Halwachs and others, they are the result of scientific investigation and analysis, and contrast as sharply with the non-academic literature as the image of "gypsies" cultivated by the latter does with true Romani identity. Indeed, a clear parallel is evident here between the two: those writing about Romanies generally maintain scholarly standards; those writing about "small-g gypsies" see no need to do so.The newcomer to the field has a difficult job discerning the two.

When the Cowan findings were made public (in Gresham, et al., 2001), the immediate response from a subscriber on one Romani/Traveller listserve (posted 12:xij:01) and himself an academic was that they were just a "newly souped-up version of racialist thought . . . crap".Such reaction, and the debate it engenders is necessary; it moves the discipline forward and separates the useful lines of pursuit from those leading nowhere; but the arena is not mostly populated by specialists who are in a position to judge and critique the data.The overwhelming majority of those with even a passing interest in Romanies are the same people that might read Stephen King's Thinner or watch Walt Disney's Hunchback of Notre Dame.

Working with my own students over the years, I hear from them repeatedly that they cannot tell whether the sources they are consulting for their own research papers are reliable or not.Should a project on Romani religious belief rely on Wood?Should a study of gender roles use Walker as a source?Is Moreau a good book for early Romani history?All have been assumed to be trustworthy by my students. If there is to be a sincere concern for Romani Studies there must be a sincere concern for Romanies too, and the same criticism we do not hesitate to level at the work of our academic colleagues must extend to the popular treatments which, after all, reach a far larger audience and which help to shape the misconceptions and attitudes associated with the Romani people.

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